Liaison – everybody talks about it, but what is it and does it actually create impact?

According to Oxford English dictionary, liaison is defined as the “Communication or cooperation which facilitates a close working relationship between people or organisations”.

MasterMind, and particularly WP9, has been dedicated to keeping the project in sync with other initiatives and complementary objectives to facilitate close working relationships and support synergies with other initiatives. We believe that it’s crucial to transfer and share results and experiences to other settings to support research and implementation in eMental health across Europe.

To support liaison, raising awareness of our project, and exchanging ideas and information with others both on project and partner level have been key. During MasterMind, the project has been part of minimum 20 events, conferences, and workshops, where the audience has been important stakeholders; such as care professionals and decision makers. Also, we should not forget to mention that MasterMind has been the main actor in the further development of MAST for assessments of eMental health.

The project partners have played a key role in supporting the liaison activities and their engagement and contribution has had great impact. Throughout the project, they have been part of minimum 26 local, regional, and national events and have collaborated with 17 local, regional, and national projects and programmes. Just to mention a few things, MasterMind has initiated a discussion on reimbursement of vide-based psychotherapy and put pressure on policy makers in relation to initiating national roll-out of cCBT. It seems evident that MasterMind has had an impact on the local settings and influenced the health area in the partner regions. This makes MasterMind a good example when talking about liaison and its actual ability to create impact.

We proudly feel that the experiences and results achieved in the project can play an important role for ongoing and new implementation initiatives for cCBT and videoconferencing in mental health and beyond. The good results and many lessons learned will live on through the project partners as they bring their knowledge to other projects and contexts.
With this said, we hope that many new projects will take further advantage of the work and knowledge created to support the evidence building in the field of eMental health and eHealth in general.